


Mr. Buttons Finds his Groove

by jazzfic



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 15:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1082904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which holiday cheer comes wrapped in the small worries of parenthood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. Buttons Finds his Groove

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Prompts in Panem - Everlark during the holiday season.

The first batch of gingerbread men did not so much resemble a sweet-scented holiday treat as they did the survivors of a volcanic eruption. Pulled steaming from the oven that winter day, they caused the small audience gathered in the kitchen to cry out in disappointment, and the bearer of the tray to bite his lip so as to not laugh and hurt any feelings. 

Fortunately for the sake of morale (or not – it all depended really on whose side you were on in this little culinary adventure), as a side effect it appeared that the gingerbread men had, on closer inspection, turned out slightly rude. 

“Daddy, why does that one have a thingy?”

“Um,” said Peeta. 

“And is that one you and mommy? See, those ones have joined. They look like you and mommy do when you make the bedroom dark.”

Down came the tray onto the bench. Peeta shook off the gloves from his hands with a slight grimace and turned to address the two faces peering up at him. “Bedrooms are for sleeping, little man, you know that.” He spoke gently, smoothing over the white lie by reaching across to brush a scattering of flour off Henley’s pink cheek. “Have you been spying again?”

The boy considered this with a frown, while in the corner of his eye Peeta noted an all too familiar smirk appearing on his daughter’s lips. It reminded him of another expression on another face he knew, a face he woke up to each morning and the last he saw each night. One hard and blunt with knowing. And fearless to speak it. 

He saw this now, and held up a finger to her, holding off the biting words he knew would erupt if she were given the audience and her little brother’s ear. Because then even the most monstrous sugary creation would not hold off the ensuing fight, tears, and accusations. 

Peeta liked an organized kitchen. He thrived off of it. But he also thrilled, just a little, at the fun that came from throwing all the ingredients into one bowl. Which tended to happen in the literal sense whenever he let the kids play at ‘daddy’s job’. 

“Come on, guys.” He cleared a space and hoisted Henley onto the nearest stool. “Let’s pick out the best ones to put on a plate. They can be for special afters, before bedtime. That sound good?”

Henley bobbed his curly head, the delicate topic of thirty seconds prior all forgotten. 

“Yeah?” Peeta prompted again, pulling a face and eliciting a fresh round of giggles. 

“Yeah!”

He turned his grin to the other side of the table. “What about you, Marji?”

Marjorie Mellark pulled at the end of her dark braid. “O-kay,” she sing-songed quietly. She was doing that thing again. The thing when she considered Peeta with her mother’s eyes. It both warmed and unsettled him; the first because that was _her_. The last mostly because he couldn’t help feeling very oddly like prey.

 

::

 

“I think we have a problem.”

Peeta gazed up at the ceiling, waiting as cool air snuck in through the inch of opened window and lifted the edge of the curtains like a conversation half spoken. There was a long moment of quiet before Katniss’s head, buried dark and motionless into the pillow beside him, made a small movement that preceded an even smaller sigh. “What?” she murmured. “Have the geese started coming in under the fence again?”

“No. Something worse. A lot worse.”

The mattress dipped. A warm hand settled on his chest. Peeta brushed his fingers up and down the olive skin, pulled the hand to his lips and kissed the bumps there. A ridge of telling on each of his wife’s fingers, calluses made by pre-dawn journeys into the forest, working, always working and never stopping. He loved the story made real in his head. He loved that she always came back. 

He felt her sit up. Her eyes sought him out in the dim light, concerned now. But she must have caught sight of his expression, because they snapped shut again and she fell back onto the pillow. “Oh, Peeta...I need to sleep. Can’t it wait?”

Peeta shrugged. This was possibly a talk they should be having while awake and not tempting fate by purposely clashing the two tempers of grumpiness and amusement. Possibly, if he had been in a more generous mood. 

“I think the kids have...heard.”

“Heard?”

He looked over. His hand pulled lazily at a lock of her hair. “Us.” 

This time the silence stretched over the mountaintops, winding its way back through a valley of extremely weighty pause. When he figured she’d made it back down to the metaphorical bottom again Peeta raised an eyebrow, taking in with some amusement the small round shape she let open between her lips. 

“Oh,” she said.

He rocked himself up and circled a forearm over her body. The eyes he saw there were still clouded with sleep, but she managed to match his gaze temptingly in the dark. “ _Oh_ , exactly.” 

Then, in what he personally felt was quite a smooth move, he closed the distance between them so that the soft press of her breasts were trapped beneath his t-shirt. He hovered there, taking in the feel of her, and was all ready to make his point in a more non-verbal fashion when she jutted her chin away, and instead of her lips Peeta caught a mouthful of earlobe. 

He groaned into the pillow. It smelled vaguely of wet cat, and he suddenly had a very clear recollection of Marji bringing in Buttercup from the rain; and that recollection turned to wondering when they’d last had a proper laundry day that had actually extended beyond the usual multitude of soiled child-shaped things to his and Katniss’s own bedding... 

...then he realised that Katniss was still beneath him, eyes cool and silvery and unblinking. And she was speaking. 

“Well, whose fault is that, hmm? You are I both know who the vocal one is in this debate, and it’s damn well not me.”

Feeling grumpy and deflated, he rolled away. 

“I don’t know whether to feel proud or insulted, Katniss. Thanks.”

The curtains billowed. Peeta shivered, and was about to concede his one inch of open window maybe wasn’t the best of ideas now the season was really upon them, when he felt her lips press gently onto his shoulder. She moved over the breadth of his chest, barely-there touches wet and warm on his neck, on his jaw, and he turned in to her, unresisting, opening his mouth lazily. They kissed for a long moment until that moment turned into another, and another still.

“I’d go with proud, if I were you. Take it like a champ,” she said, reaching between them and pulling his hand unceremoniously to her breast.

And, well. She had him there.

 

::

 

He had written off the first lot as an anomaly, a blip in his impeccable record, but when the second batch of gingerbread men came out even worse, Peeta began to worry. 

“I don’t understand,” he said, peering at the melted faces, the sad eyes staring empty and wide back into his. “They went in perfect. I just don’t understand. Help me, guys.”

But there was no answer. Marji and Henley had by this stage lost interest in holiday baking. Because now the snow was falling thick and their attention was out there, where it was fun and bright and sparkling. Not in here, where confusion reigned and Daddy was left talking to a big orange blob on a tray. 

 

::

 

In winter, frosted in white, the district changed. 

Twin bootprints made by little feet began to appear each day in the garden snow, sprawling figures that looped and lurched and folded back in on themselves, only to be erased at night and recreated again the next morning. While Katniss took her trade to the families, she left in that yard three padded figures, shapeless and soft, who called out to one another over the course of an afternoon. 

Yes, better fun to be had out here, where newly improvised holiday traditions didn’t cause frowns and confusion and awkward questions.

When he could no longer feel his toes, Peeta herded the children inside. As usual a flash of orange fur beat them through the door, cold and ruffled and smelling of damp. 

“Yeah, cat. I feel you,” he muttered as he unwrapped Henley from his many layers. 

Buttercup had nothing to add to this conversation. He merely blinked into the dark crackle of the hearth and purred.

“Daddy,” said Marjorie, folding her arms around his middle as they thawed by the fire. “Mr. Buttons melted.”

“I know, sugarkin. We’ll try a new batch tomorrow.”

Her lips turned downward. She pulled away with a huff, her hands, still gloved and damp, pressing impatiently at his knees. “No. Mr. Buttons is a _snow_ -gingerbread-man. I made him to watch the cabbages.”

Peeta began peeling the gloves away. He held her hands out until the fire breathed them dry. “The cabbages don’t need watching,” he said gently. “They’re safe beneath the soil.” 

He couldn’t fool her. He couldn’t even come close. “I know _that_. But he’s waiting for springtime. He’s a sen-e-tery.”

“I see,” said Peeta. “Well, a sentry, that’s a brave job.”

“That’s why he melted. He was too brave.”

“Who was too brave?” asked a new voice from the kitchen.

Katniss came into the big room and shook out her jacket, twisting around and clucking her tongue as a small blond head butted its way in between her legs. She scooped him up and whispered something in his ear. Two pairs of identically colored eyes fell on Peeta and Marjorie as they sat together on the couch.

The girl slipped out of Peeta’s hold. Katniss put Henley down and kissed her daughter’s cheek. “You’re almost as cold as me,” she said with a slight frown, smoothing the dark braids down. 

“There’s no special afters today.” Marji swung her head back between each parent, the bearer or grave news. “Daddy threw them to the geese. But we made better ones outside.” 

Explanation over, she grabbed hold of her brother’s hand and sat him by the fire, next to Buttercup and Buttercup’s twitching, ready tail. 

“Did you now?” Katniss’s eyes found Peeta over their heads, another question hovering there which he assumed, rightly, could be one of many. Talk of the night before, that underlying anxiety that all children grew up too fast and all parents make wrong steps, and this while they still had so much learning to do. He thought of how to respond. To step too hesitantly was itself a dangerous path, but opting for too much bravado could very well get him booted out the door with the cat alongside.

Then he thought something else: _it didn’t matter._

Peeta stood with the warmth of the fire, and met her kiss halfway.


End file.
